26 February 2010

In their broadest terms, the criticisms leveled at President Obama by his detractors, from both the tea-baggers and his former base, sound a lot like those hurled at his predecessor: he’s a warmonger in the pockets of big corporations! He wants to turn our Great Democracy into a totalitarian state! So it's tough to discern who the crazies in The Crazies—the empty-eyed, unresponsive and homicidal friends-n'-neighbors in director Eisner's bleak-minded, well-paced Romero “re-imagining”—are meant to represent: are they the voters who yearned for change? Or the race-anxioushomophobic free-marketeer heartlanders who didn't? Actually, it doesn't matter! Because the politically broad The Crazies mistrusts partisans of all stripes.

It’s wickedly subversive that the number one movie ever (not adjusted for inflation, thus meaningless) is about a marine who rejects the American Army and joins up with The Terrorists. Because, obviously, that’s what [Avatar]’s tall, blue tribesmen are; Cameron makes the allegories blatant, with American contractors harvesting an energy source from lands occupied by indigenous peoples unimpressed by the occupiers’ school-building efforts. (Well, there are parallels to the American Indian genocide, too, natch.) When the Earthlings destroy the Na’vis’ “Hometree” (groan), it evokes the felling of the Twin Towers, driving home the suggestion that the Americans are “terrorists,” too.

Last Friday, two more New York movies opened, begging for comparison: the Wall-Street-is-bad The Good Guy and, well, the Wall-Street-is-bad The Last New Yorker. Though the former is centered on transplanted yuppie scum, and the latter on elderly, displaced natives, the two films are essentially about the same thing: couples being pushed out of a city in which they don't belong. In The Last New Yorker, it's for cultural and, even more so, economic reasons; in The Good Guy, it's moral.

21 February 2010

The Last New Yorker, a slight, warm, charming and geriatric romance, is a paean to and eulogy for the remnants of Old New York, still barely just visible in this post-gentrified, post-Rudy-Bloomie city: the pubs serving corned beef, the newsstands, the tailors and jewelers. In short, the mom-and-pop businesses, all of which seem to be getting bought out in the film—and many of which, in real life, have shuttered since shooting wrapped. One character walks to his favorite steakhouse, only to discover it's become an empty lot. It's a city of eroding signage, graffitoed walls, cranes, construction sites and scaffolding. Director Wang, welcomely, boasts a longtime native's sense of the city, embodied in the title character, Lenny (Dominic Chainese), an elderly, caviling Jewish man cut from a cloth they don't sell in the garment district anymore. "Do you think I could survive anywhere but here?" he asks. "I'll never leave New York." (Which he means almost literally; he's visited Jersey.) Still, he admits to an old friend, "it's getting crueler."

"Bad" equals "Wall Street" in The Good Guy, a caustic depiction and moral exploration of Bloomberg's New York couched in the conventions of the romantic dramedy. Vagina-waxing bitches and douchebag daytraders, a.k.a megamoney misogynists—indistinguishable white dudes and carefully placed minorities, for Hangover-style "hilarity"—surround the only living decent twentysomethings in New York, the City of Bullshitters: an army-vet computer tech (Bryan Greenberg) and a urban conservationist (Alexis Bledel). She preserves old things, like New Amsterdam-era walls, and old ways, like human decency. In the contemporary city, where she and her soldier boy are moral outsiders, a million dollars is "a buck," coinage goes in the garbage, books are gay, being nice to women is gay, piñatas are packed with prescription pills and "old-fashioned" means "preferring vaginal intercourse".

Hey, I...like[d] Freeman’s performance [here]—which is saying something, because I don’t usually like Morgan Freeman. He always acts with his voice, and what I liked most here is that he was forced to assume an accent, and so it was like watching an actor I’m not sick of. Of course, he won’t win the Oscar—that would have been like giving Obama an Academy Award. (The Nobel Peace Prize isn’t enough?) Because...the Obama parallels are glaring[...]: the assassination paranoia; the thrilled, historically oppressed black population; the looming unemployment problems. Did you notice the way he alienates his base with his message of compromise reconciliation? And yet he still manages to push through rugby reform. Obama should call a meeting with Morgan Freeman right away.

This turns out to be a Profile in Rugby Courage, and...it’s a great movie right up to the point that it becomes terrible.

Once again, the Oscar [nomination] goes to... the big, brash, brawny performance! In The Messenger, that comes courtesy of Woody Harrelson, whose character has the thankless task of delivering news of army casualties to the dead soldier’s Next of Kin. He’s as emotionally unmoveable in his duties as a Buckingham Palace guard—no tears, touching, or stutters—as you might expect from a character named [S]Tony Stone. (Why not Rocky Rock?) Gee, I wonder if he’ll break down and cry by the end of the movie? Anyway, the better turn comes from Stone’s new partner, Will, played by Ben Foster...It’s a much quieter performance, characterized more by welling eyes than scenery chewing, all the more surprising as it comes from Foster, who I know more for bouncing off the walls in Alpha Dog or going full retard in Freaks and Geeks.

Foster, of course, has to tone it down because epic emotions and high-volume drama are all around him, provided by the family members to whom Rocky and Will must deliver bad news, most of whom blame, as in displace their anguish and rage on—wait for it—The Messengers...

05 February 2010

From Paris with Love, a politico-hilarious buddy action-comedy, concerns an American special operative invading a foreign country (France, home of chess-playing sex crazies) and engaging in indiscriminate murder and mass destruction of property. Hey—just like last year's Taken! But this time, it's funny. Director Morel, who also helmed that exuberant Liam Neeson revenge fantasy, is shaping up to be the War on Terror's greatest, and perhaps only, satirist.

John Travolta stars as the secret agent and has a gleeful time, his best work in years, embodying the archetypal boorish American, with his muthafuckin this and cocksuckin that, his love of firearms, energy drinks and cheeseburgers (there's a cute Pulp Fiction reference), his mild racism and action hero bons mots. He's rude to waiters, encourages coke-snorting on the Eiffel Tower elevator(!), and initiates scenes of epic violence, like the "Shaw Brothers chop suey show," a guns-blazing shooting spree, he puts on in at a Chinese restaurant...

"Based on actual events," Terribly Happy (Frygtelig lykkelig) follows Robert (Jakob Cedergren), a cop from Cop[enhagen] out of water, and at loggerheads with the locals, in the Danish countryside-town to which he has been relocated. Oh, so it's like Hot Fuzz? Right, except it's not funny (critics have been calling it "darkly comic" because they think that's a synonym for "Scandinavian"). Oh, then it's like Sleepy Hollow? Well, yeah, except it isn't scary. Then, like a Coen Brothers movie (isn't Fargo essentially a Scandinavian movie?)? What, with all the weirdoes that occupy the margins; or a David Lynch movie, with its anxious edge of malformation and menace? Yes, it's an insubstantial imitation of all of those—and more! It feels terribly 90s, when such half-considered emulations arrived with frequency, as though you should be renting it on VHS—or taping it off pre-Queer Eye Bravo—because you saw a preview for it before whatever Miramax misfire you'd misguidedly rented the day before.

I’m so sick of these fucking Oscar movies! Up in the Air may have been the most vexing of the lot [I've seen] so far, but The Blind Side, disgusting in its every detail, is by far the most insipid—and, uh, racist. And, uh, American. It’s about three of this country’s favorite things: Christianity, Football, and dumb black folk succeeding thanks to the charity of white people. I argued in [an earlier piece] that Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire was conservative in its own tricky way, but this movie wears its Republican agenda like a badge of honor. In Lee Daniels’ movie, Precious succeeds thanks to a network of social institutions; Michael Oher, the hero of this movie—who, in Real Life, went from homeless to N.F.L. star—succeeds thanks to the intervention of privatized forces: generous and wealthy individuals, private schools and private tutors. Look at that Free Market, takin’ care of business!

03 February 2010

D13:U opens three years after its ultimatum-less predecessor left off. "The government has changed," a title card imparts. "But nothing else." Right: Damien (Cyril Raffaelli) and Leito (David Belle) again must unite to defeat a nefarious government plot to bomb the titular ghetto. But much else, in fact, is different: the impoverished denizens of the walled-in slum, now self-segregated by ethnicity, have more face tattoos; there's more slo-mo, more awesomeness-reinforcing replays of the ante-upped action, more unwinding with sexy hos. In short, another man is sitting in the director's chair.

Pierre Morel helmed the rip-roaring first-entry in this Franco franchise-to-be, but has since gone on to collect paychecks in American dollars; screenwriter-producer Luc Besson, the Apatow of Gallic action, appointed Patrick Alessandrin to take over, and the new director, usually successfully, mostly mimics Morel—except the action editing isn't as precise, the storytelling not as taut...